The same questions, asked of everyone who works with somebody, answered without a name on them.
A 360 asks the people around somebody the same set of questions: their manager, their peers, the people who report to them, and the person themselves. The gap between how somebody sees their own work and how everybody else sees it is usually the most useful thing on the page.
A 360 collects feedback on one person from several directions at once. It works on behavior rather than results, and it depends completely on anonymity. Without it you collect politeness.
Once or twice a year, and never in the same month as a pay review. The moment a 360 feels connected to somebody's salary, the answers change.
The questions, in full
Every one of them is on this page before you sign up for anything. The line under each question says what it is for, and what it is deliberately not asking.
The chart that suits the question, and a paragraph under it.
Numbers get the widget built for them. Written answers get grouped into the things people kept saying, with a count on each and every original answer still readable underneath, word for word.
Everything a results page holdsWhat goes wrong with a 360 survey
- Running one where a group is small enough to identify the author. Merge the peer and cross-team groups rather than reporting three answers separately.
- Attaching it to pay or promotion. The feedback stops being honest the moment there is money attached.
- Handing somebody raw comments with no conversation around them. A 360 without a debrief does more harm than not running one.
- Showing the subject only the averages. A number tells them nothing they can act on, and the written comments are the part that changes behavior.
How many people should give feedback?
Six to ten is the usual range. Fewer than five and anonymity gets hard to hold. More than twelve and you get a lot of very shallow answers.
Should the person being reviewed answer it themselves?
Yes. The self-assessment is what makes the rest readable, because the gap between it and everyone else is the actual finding.
How do we keep it anonymous?
Answers carry no name unless you ask for one. Group the relationship categories so no group is tiny, and report written comments as a set rather than one by one.
Often run alongside this one
Employee engagement survey
An engagement survey is the long one, run once or twice a year. Its job is not to produce a number, because eNPS already does that in one question and does it more often. Its job is to tell you which specific parts of working here are holding the number down.
eNPS survey
Employee Net Promoter Score borrows the NPS® question and points it at the people who work for you. It is a good measure and an easy one to ruin, because the moment somebody suspects their answer is traceable, you stop measuring morale and start measuring caution.